There is a big difference between the free market where individuals and corporations may use their own property in order to make money and a common carrier that often relies on an exclusive license, either through licensed spectrum or license to lay physical cable across public rights of way in order to do its business. Both spectrum and rights of way across land are finite public resources which make a free market both practically impossible and the attempt to impose one undesirable. The public simply has a right to say how the publics' right of way is used and what benefits we expect in return. The essence of this artificial monopoly that common carriers are bestowed with is that rights of way are taken away from general public use in order to provide a necessary or good service that could otherwise not be provided.
Tending to view things with a view towards freedom, I do think there is a limit to what can be expected of a common carrier, but the fees which can be charged and to whom they can be charged are well within the publics right to dictate. And if the common carrier doesn't want to live by the rules, then they can take their cables up and make way for someone who will abide by the people's will. Really then it is simply a practical matter about what kind of rules will create a system which will be potentially rewarding enough for private corporations and individuals to risk investing in. There are also considerations about fairness and not changing the rules after investments have been made, but those are also risks that investors take when operating on the public right of way.
There is nothing inconsistent with libertarianism about understanding when government authority is needed and when it is not. Libertarianism is about maintaining good laws which are consistent with and are measured by how they promote individual freedom as a means to happiness, it is not about doing away with laws arbitrarily. The difference is that other political philosophies put other sometimes conflicting values equal to or above those, not that they do not also consider these as important values.
First, the GP says, "some standards' patent licensors forbid implementors to publish a partial implementation. I don't know if this applies to OOXML's license." A classic FUD tactic is to speculate about something "bad" then say, "I don't know if it applies here." Yeah, you don't know if it applies in this case, but that didn't stop you from putting forth the "Fear" and "Uncertainty" that it might. Classic. Sorry I guess you would be an expert on FUD tactics, hope you are enjoying your new laptop. Or are you just getting paid cash by Microsoft?
Then, the parent post uses pharses like, "My understanding is...", "It seems that if...", ect. Again, phrases used to intentionally spread FUD without making explicit assertions. Classic.
BTW, there is NO "Full implementation requirement" for OpenXML. None. I am making a clear assertion that can be verified. From what I have read about the OOXML license, Microsoft can and will enforce its patents and trademarks against any developer that deviates from the OOXML standard and still calls it OOXML. No you don't have to fully implement it in terms of every XML element, but you can't deviate from the standard without violating the license. That would seem fine if Microsoft was a third party that wasn't making a competing product and could be trusted to enforce this requirement on itself, but it has an financial incentive not to do so and a long track record of "embrace and extend".
So, no it does not have to be a full implementation in terms of implementing every last XML tag, but say if Microsoft introduces a new series of tags that are outside the standard it is fine for them since they are not implementing OOXML under a license, but if any licensor of OOXML tries to follow their lead, then Microsoft could sue them for violating the terms of the license. Microsoft looks like they are going ahead regardless of the standardization, but this certainly has a potential to get messy.
Microsoft would get a great deal of negative press for a move to copy its own deviation from the standard and it would jeopardize its use in government, but it is a possible scenario under this flawed standard. More likely they will just extend the format in awkward ways while still technically following the standard, that way they can maintain technical compliance with ECMA OOXML and just jam in incompatibilities under the allowed way of doing extensions.
So you have an email attack based on the idea that people keep the phone number of their bank in their address book? Rather why would I bother if I can always just get it off their website or from my statement? I suppose changing an electronic statement to put the fake number on it is also possible. But how is this really related to VOIP? The problem still remains one of some email attachment taking over your computer and accessing your personal and confidential information that you have stored there. The rest could just as easily be accomplished via the regular phone.
Granted, there are still glitches to work with, mainly related to wireless support. That is true of Windows as well, I mean wireless security set-up is a joke in Windows XP, not an easy joke, but rather a bad one. Sure you could blame incompatible hardware implementations just as Linux users do, but the fact remains that trying to set up wireless security on Windows is a usability nightmare which is probably why most people seam to be leaving it off.
but some standards' patent licensors forbid implementors to publish a partial implementation. I don't know if this applies to OOXML's license. My understanding is that Microsoft was going to enforce full implementations of the standard, except on themselves of course, so it really makes OOXML untenable as common format. What you get is an open standard that everyone but Microsoft has to follow exactly and implement fully, but only Microsoft could follow it and implement it fully. And then even if someone could manage to implement MS's XML fully and perfectly, then Microsoft could just pull a bait and switch would break compatibility.
Actually, I am wondering about this so called open standard actually being a way to legally create compatibility problems. I am not sure what the legal framework under which OpenOffice currently opens and writes Word Docs and other Microsoft compatible formats. But it seems that if OOXML becomes the default format, then the only way to use the format would be under a Microsoft license, but if that license requires a full implentation, then Microsoft could probably find something that wasn't implemented the same as MS Office to sue over or else it could break its own compatibility with the format and then sue any company that tried to deviate from the ECMA standard, even though Microsoft can deviate from the standard with impunity and immunity.
i.e. who you vote for should be public knowledge, it's insane that a person should have to hide their vote in a country with 300,000,000 people. Well, if we did away with voter anonymity, then electronic voting would be the best thing to do since anyone could count up the votes and see who won. Though, I think coercion and vote buying are legitimate risks. Even peer pressure is a form of coercion because of the real risk of social ostracization. People will often go along with whatever faction or group they associate most with rather than making an informed choice about the individual based upon their own values. Something that allows people to avoid having to justify their vote to everyone is a good thing.
Is it so hard to realize that the paper ballots/trails are just as susceptible to election fraud as electronic ballots such that electronic voting is just another unfounded conspiracy theory in your mind?
Yes, it is. Election fraud is much harder to pull off when it involves someone actually putting pen to paper. Logistics are important to election fraud because it has to involve as few people as possible and be very uncomplicated to assure success. Pressing a few buttons on a computer and having a voting history destroyed or writing a program that simulates vote casting is much easier and importantly could involve fewer people than physically creating individual frauds of paper ballots.
Oh well then, let me update my rant:
"This circle is half colored in. Obviously the voter intended to vote for my candidate." "No, it's not completely filled in. Therefore this ballot is in error and doesn't count." "This guy voted for Pat Buchanan, obviously his vote is incorrect."
Yes, the form of paper ballots matter. In my town we do well enough with having to connect an arrow with a magic marker. No it is not perfect and mistakes in "interpretation" could be made during a recount even asking people to make a clear mark. But the important thing is that there are clearly defined criteria for counting a vote that the average person can meet within a human margin of error.
My point to all this is that I voted in a county that had mechanical voting machines for nearly 50 years. They didn't have a paper trail. The only thing that was updated was a mechanical counter inside the machine that kept the tallies. These machines were opened during the day to check the counts (at which point they could also be tampered with) and at the end of the day these counts were read off and phoned to the central office then the counts were reset.
That would be just as bad as any other virtual ballot system, but I doubt you are describing the story in full. I too have voted on the machines with the little switches and the big lever, but I recall that there was also a roll of paper where a mark was made for each vote cast, which could be recounted if needed. I have nothing against this method, or for that matter computer ballots, as long as there is a physical record of the actual vote. What was lacking in the machine you describe, was a way for the voter to verify that the vote was recorded the way he or she voted.
What's the difference between the mechanical and the evoting ones? Ultimately nothing. Ultimately you have to trust the people running the system because otherwise Democracy means nothing because you don't trust your fellow man to properly vote or check your vote. I realize that's difficult when Bush is trying to orchestrate a coup to overthrow Democracy, especially after all those Diebold machines gave the vote to Republicans in this last mid-term election. But hey, that's how it goes.
The point is that you have to trust most people in a Democracy to do the right thing, but you can't trust everyone. The system must be designed so that individual corruption does not so easily corrupt the whole system. Computer balloting, especially without a voter verified paper trail, threatens this principal. In the past sure you could have a vast conspiracy involving hundreds of people strategically positioned at polling places to gum up the works in your opponents territory... so that what it took was a fairly elaborate dirty tricks outfit to steal an election. Now you have 5 or 10 people that know a thing or two about computers and find some vulnerability in the system and hack the election in a wholesale way.
Oh and it also becomes much more believable when the election machines stop working in a particularly busy district and the long lines reduce turnout and votes never even get cast. Much harder to justify those long turnout reducing lines when all someone needs is a pen and a surface to write on.
Actually the US did have a standing army, the Marines
Technically speaking the Marines Corps are part of a standing Navy. The extent to which the Marines are a independent land fighting force was at least partly because of the founders fears of a standing Army which became separate from the citizenry.
I can tell you first hand that there are a lot of military families out there who love America, but despise most civilian Americans as undeserving of their freedom. This is the most dangerous type of factionalism which has played itself out in predictable ways in other countries over and over again throughout history. Thankfully that there is enough turnover in the military to discourage this potential factionalism from becoming dominant. And the doctrine of service is repeated over and over again at every level.
But the founders had it right, as a society in the longer term we are much better off with a smaller standing Army but with a much bigger reservoir of reserves. This promotes defense over offense and prevents an idling Army from getting resentful and ambitious. But most importantly it makes us one people in our nations defense instead of factions looking out for themselves.
"Oh yeah because paper ballots were used so well to confirm the Florida elections in 2000 and sparking a constitutional crisis."
I consider paper ballots as where the person actually makes a mark with ink on a piece of paper, not some weird misconceived contraption where you punch holes in the paper with a poker. By that way of thinking even if the computer makes the actual mark you would still be calling it a paper ballot. Pen and paper, is it that inefficient that we are scrambling to get away from it?
Is it so hard to conceive of an imperfect world where people don't want to play by the rules, that election fraud is relegated to just another unfounded conspiracy theory in you mind?
I do think the motivations of some are very suspicious, but I think the motivations are probably more based on the desire to make money on voting equipment. That voting machines make election fraud easier and nearly undetectable maybe just a side benefit.
Oh and were those hanging chads really worse than a virtual electronic ballot? At least the malfunction in the system was detectable. In a computer, errors in programming or hardware, either intentional or not, would be somewhat abstracted from the final result. Personally, I would prefer that both I and the elected person know that there is some doubt as to the intentions of the electorate versus allowing a elected official to hold office without knowing that his or her election was the result of some funny business.
But yes, some people would rather live in a society without integrity where the conflicts and corruption is ignored for as long as possible. Short term peace at the expense of longer term integrity.
Video podcasts can definitely outperform traditional broadcast media in some ways, but to even imagine that they will supplant/usurp regaulr television is naive.
Ah but you are missing the point. Podcasts are a distribution mechanism for video content, not a separate form of content. Podcasts could indeed supplant regular television as a broadcast medium, just as the Internet has supplanted television and newspapers for a lot of our entertainment already. The big players will just move to the new medium, as they have been doing. So it isn't that the lone podcasters can match the superior technical skills and equipment of the big media companies, it is that they don't need to in order for video podcasts to become more popular. People like to download videos, and bigger players will either move or evolve into this online space, just as they have in other traditional media areas that have moved online. The biggest difference is that now instead of the only 5 content distributors that you had with broadcast licenses and cable monopolies you will have a top 5 out of millions, the only thing to stop this is if the ISP monopolies are allowed to begin to discriminate against Internet traffic that competes with their content.
So polygraph is a very expensive baseball bat? No it is more like a very expensive lie, closer to telling someone that they have a guy in the other room that is telling them a different story every time they feel the person being interrogated looks a little nervous after answering a question.
Threats of bodily harm by the police or government agents are actually illegal as an interrogation method (despite the actual use of threats more recently), but otherwise lying to someone is not. So, you can't legally lie to them, but they can legally lie to you.
We're running out of oil, faced with the probability of using ever-more CO2-generating coal to fuel our civilization, and we're (the "we" being "anybody who's paying attention") supposed to be excited about sending astronauts into orbit to solve exactly none of these potentially life-threatening problems? I'd call that a good thing. I'd call that knowing your priorities. Not just into orbit, we are talking about spending tens of billions of dollars sending a few elite individuals to lifeless barren worlds which conceivably offer the rest of humanity nothing tangible in return. Wow, sounds great to me. Space exploration wasn't supposed to be a pissing contest, despite what you might think about the cold war race to the moon, but that seems to be what it has become again.
But I did excited about the plans to look for other earth like (or at least earth sized) planets in other nearby solar systems. Finding a planet with the potential for complex life, and not just microbes or bacteria should be the goal of exploration. And we are pretty sure at this point that ain't happening in this solar system. So build bigger telescopes or try to figure out a way to get out of our solar system in a human lifetime and I will be excited, but until then I will be more excited about how many pixels are in my next camera or how fuel efficient my next car is or how medicine is improving quality of life.
There are people who are desperate to get as many articles on Blue Ray and HD-DVD written in order to push both the format of the media and HD technology in general. There are 10s, if not 100s, of billions of dollars at stake and plenty of marketing money to grease tech writers and publishers wheels. The government too has a horse in this race as digital television must not only succeed but at least appear to be popular in the market to justify the forced change over to HD that is taking place. Eventually consumers will have better choices. Right now it isn't a question of whether HD is better for viewing video or not, but at this point it seems that the price isn't worth the product. To spend thousands of dollars before you even start talking about the cost of the actual content that will be displayed on the technology, simply isn't a type of math that most people can afford to do. For now you will have a steadily increasing minority switching over to HD TVs, but for most people they are going to be much better off spending their technology dollars on lower priced computer equipment where they can be both entertained and productive, rather than the entertainment dollar black hole which is what HDTV is all about.
It wasn't so much that so many "ideas" failed in the 90s, it was just the one really bad idea that failed: That you can build a profitable company by just getting people to come to your website without any idea of how to get them to come back or how you where going to make money from them while you had their attention.
I think just about every actual content idea has since made money for some company or other, but with many casualties along the way. But given how many businesses fail, let alone new businesses, from sandwich shops to.com blowouts, it is hard to say which "ideas" were bad ones for profitable websites. Even niche web sites which couldn't be profitable on there own, have sometimes been successfully integrated into some larger network of websites which can make enough money to support a business that can support its employees plus make a profit for its owners.
Often we fixate on the mega successes and failures, but overlook the thousands of small businesses or individuals that have made a decent living off of what others would term "bad ideas" that larger companies couldn't make profitable.
Actually, I don't think so. For instance, your bags are subject to search without a warrant or probable cause if you are on the New York City public transit system
Ah but the legal theory there is based on consent. You can refuse to have your bag searched, but then you don't get to ride the train. Similar to the way government buildings search people, they can search your stuff because you give them permission to do so. At any point you could say no and turn around and leave. Same theory with airports. Not sure, how those signs that say that just being on the train or on public property means that you have already consented to being searched would legally work though. For practical purposes, you could just say you didn't see the signs and/or that you do not agree to be searched and then if they went ahead anyway then I believe the search would have to be considered illegal.
I could see how a judge might be tempted to allow illegal searches to go ahead, but I really don't see how you can claim consent if before the bag is searched the person would explicitly deny their consent. But I could see how once a sign like that was posted giving notification implied consent, then that would certainly apply to active scans of people and things like that.
But then again, good laws are being ignored for the sake of convenience here in the US these days, so pretty much all you need to do is claim some sort of vague legal principal of police necessity and crush whatever civil right you choose.
The problem with many linux users is that they fail to realize that your "normal" computer user is NOTHING like they are. Linux CAN succeed but it really needs a set of standards to follow. People don't like inconsistency. They really don't even like choice. They don't want to have to choose one of the 300 active distros.
I'm sorry, but this "linux users... fail to realize.." stuff is really old. Linux users don't fail to realize, but most can't do anything about it. Saying that people don't want choice is all well and good, but... who gets to decide what choices people don't get to make? I am sure that Fedora people wouldn't care if ubuntu and debian went away and vice versa. And the KDE team would be just fine if Gnome decided to fold up shop, though I think we would all miss the stupid arguments like this thread. And if Windows went away then there would certainly be the less choice that you seem to think people want.
"They want "Linux" and they want it to work as easily as Windows does."
Now you are contradicting yourself. Regular users don't want choice, you say, even if there is equivalent functionality, especially if there is equivalent functionality.
As a Linux user, I want Linux to work more easily than windows does. And I believe most current linux users want linux to work at least as easily as windows does, but would expect more in terms of free software and capability than Windows in order to justify the switching costs. But people should be clear, when by "work as easily" we don't mean anything really to do with the desktop layout or what programs are accessible in the menus or how applications actually start or how do you manage your files. All that basic functionality is there and works as well and is possibly easier to use than windows. What we mean by "works as well" really is that we want plug and play capabilities or at least plug and play with a good sub set of peripheral devices to meet all the every day desktop and laptop computing needs.
With Linux on the desktop and laptop it seems like it is always going to be just that one thing. It is the same problem that Mac OS users had all those years. You walk into a store, you have a wall of peripherals certified to work for Windows. Some for Mac and even fewer more basic things like network cards and the like might come with a penguin on it.
But then, especially if you do your homework you can find some web site somewhere that says they got a particular device that you need to work on the distro that you are using. So you go ahead and buy it because it is the cheapest one that still has a decent brand you recognize. These days it seems to be wireless USB 802.11 devices, and PCMCIA cards or the like, at least have cause me the most problems. So you get your device home, cross your fingers, plug it in and then you find you just wasted $30 on something that some guy on some web site thought he got working, but apparently didn't write down the right steps. Oh and you wasted an hour figuring you must have done something wrong yourself. You probably did, or really I probably did, but the point is that it should have been plug and play.
Sure there are plenty of places to go and get hardware lists, and these days wikis are making it easier to get decent information, but these throw away statements about ease of use aren't very helpful to people working on these problems. Linux is easy, probably easier than Windows. But companies aren't making products to meet the demand because Windows is a higher volume market. I'd be willing to pay $5 more for a USB 802.11 dongle if I knew that it would work with my ubuntu install and I could call support if it didn't, but the market isn't big enough for the manufacturers to bother.
So, the army of volunteers making things work is a double edged sword when it comes to newer devices. The server market has been easier to crack precisely because there is a much more limited set of devices that you would want to attach to a server. Also, embe
Not by the Supreme Court, who ruled that you have NO reasonable expectation of privacy in the public sphere.
Um what? Your possessions are still protected by privacy rights. Possessions such as your bags or your vehicles cannot be searched without a warrant or your permission. But actual possession is the key here as in a bag left in a public place could be searched without a warrant, but a bag that you carry or keep near yourself so as to still be exercising control in a public place cannot.
If it's something that will likely require people to type the domain name (as opposed to just clicking a link) I will usually set up www.home.theirdomain.com as well as home.theirdomain.com
Good practice. And one step further set up the apache redirect to have www.home.theirdomain.com redirect to home.theirdomain.com
This is identical to MS reasoning with regard to file formats; the only difference being that MS has to be very careful about who they sue due to anti-trust issues whereas AutoDesk has no such worries.
Why shouldn't they be worried? What percentage of this market do they control?
That stuff usually scales quadratically or worse with the number of objects, so it is quite some difference between a 64 player BF2 match and a lazy 2000 player day on a WoW server. If a lot of players have the stupid idea of gathering in a small area, things really get fun. Doing this requires some real hardware.
Like what? Even spec'ing out a Dell Poweredge 6800 with Quad 3.4GHz/800Mhz/16mb Cache, Dual-Core Intel® Xeon 7140M Procssors and 32GB or RAM comes to just $22,780. What kind of hardware is WoW running on? Everquest? Everquest has 1500 servers around the world according to this article They don't make their own quantum computers or anything, so they must be using the same hardware as everyone else. I'm guessing that at worst you could invest 100k in hardware and get a decent size virtual world going on 4 or 5 high end machines. Or take that same 100k and plunk it down on say 30 lower end servers and you have yourself some serious hardware capability with today's processors.
Or don't have a single monolithic game space, but rather have individual developers create a unified distributed gaming space. The web of online gaming. That would distribute the costs over multiple small developers and instead of one company needing thousands of computers to rival a big time publisher, they could invest in just a few to create a small part of a larger virtual world. Yes, the economics are still not as appealing as say running a simple web site, but expectations for an interactive online experience are pushing us in this direction. We can either choose to accept fragmentation and proprietization of the web or we can choose to adapt the open source movement to the new technology.
Most websites offer their users rather disjoint snapshots of a current state. A game needs to push a common state with some realtime requirements to all clients in a certain environment. This gets into some problems of computer science that aren't usually encountered by your common blog or webshop.
Like I said the hardware requirements are higher, but one can have about 64 simultaneous users on about $500 worth of hardware at todays prices and much less than a thousand a year in hosting. So, as long as the software allowed clustering it wouldn't take more than a few tens of thousands in hardware and yearly bandwidth costs for running a pretty large multiplayer domain. This is easily in the reach of a small business, which would need to limit its personnel costs as its primary cost consideration. A lot of the so called computer science considerations go away once you start with previously developed software. And once you are talking about creating a user community there are plenty of people that are willing to contribute content in order to make their game playing and those of others more enjoyable. I just don't see the inherent barriers that you seem to see. At least once the software would be made open source and freely available.
It is infinitely easier to create and run a website than to run an MMO.
Why so? Seems the biggest inherent difference is simply processing power needed on the server and client sides and bandwidth... but those are things that are getting cheaper every year.
All the management and sys admin stuff are done in a variety of ways through self management by many different types of open web communities. And who says that it has to be free just because the software and graphics become open source. It just means that small companies could spring up using free software to power their pay for MMOs, but that they could charge some monthly fee. I mean a lot of subscription websites run on apache and other open source free software. Server Software being open source and free makes a lot of sense because it allows greater standardization and efficiency so that a greater variety of content offerings can be made.
Contrary to popular belief, an MMOG requires a lot of logistics, financial backing and personnel to be run.
The same could have been said about websites 10 years ago, but that didn't stop tens of thousands of people from giving it a try. And... some succeeded. Or at least made a living at it, and the number of people just trying made the Internet a better thing to connect to.
They've tried to introduce $1 coins a couple times, but people don't seem to like them.
I think that is an incorrect characterization. It would be more accurate to say that people saw no reason to stop using dollar bills in favor of coins. I think if you introduced a 0.25 paper bill, then you would see a similar lack of acceptance which has little to do with the relative merits of coins versus paper money.
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well said and simply put.
There is a big difference between the free market where individuals and corporations may use their own property in order to make money and a common carrier that often relies on an exclusive license, either through licensed spectrum or license to lay physical cable across public rights of way in order to do its business. Both spectrum and rights of way across land are finite public resources which make a free market both practically impossible and the attempt to impose one undesirable. The public simply has a right to say how the publics' right of way is used and what benefits we expect in return. The essence of this artificial monopoly that common carriers are bestowed with is that rights of way are taken away from general public use in order to provide a necessary or good service that could otherwise not be provided.
Tending to view things with a view towards freedom, I do think there is a limit to what can be expected of a common carrier, but the fees which can be charged and to whom they can be charged are well within the publics right to dictate. And if the common carrier doesn't want to live by the rules, then they can take their cables up and make way for someone who will abide by the people's will. Really then it is simply a practical matter about what kind of rules will create a system which will be potentially rewarding enough for private corporations and individuals to risk investing in. There are also considerations about fairness and not changing the rules after investments have been made, but those are also risks that investors take when operating on the public right of way.
There is nothing inconsistent with libertarianism about understanding when government authority is needed and when it is not. Libertarianism is about maintaining good laws which are consistent with and are measured by how they promote individual freedom as a means to happiness, it is not about doing away with laws arbitrarily. The difference is that other political philosophies put other sometimes conflicting values equal to or above those, not that they do not also consider these as important values.
You questioned my integrity first, asshole.
First, the GP says, "some standards' patent licensors forbid implementors to publish a partial implementation. I don't know if this applies to OOXML's license." A classic FUD tactic is to speculate about something "bad" then say, "I don't know if it applies here." Yeah, you don't know if it applies in this case, but that didn't stop you from putting forth the "Fear" and "Uncertainty" that it might. Classic. Sorry I guess you would be an expert on FUD tactics, hope you are enjoying your new laptop. Or are you just getting paid cash by Microsoft? Then, the parent post uses pharses like, "My understanding is...", "It seems that if
BTW, there is NO "Full implementation requirement" for OpenXML. None. I am making a clear assertion that can be verified. From what I have read about the OOXML license, Microsoft can and will enforce its patents and trademarks against any developer that deviates from the OOXML standard and still calls it OOXML. No you don't have to fully implement it in terms of every XML element, but you can't deviate from the standard without violating the license. That would seem fine if Microsoft was a third party that wasn't making a competing product and could be trusted to enforce this requirement on itself, but it has an financial incentive not to do so and a long track record of "embrace and extend".
So, no it does not have to be a full implementation in terms of implementing every last XML tag, but say if Microsoft introduces a new series of tags that are outside the standard it is fine for them since they are not implementing OOXML under a license, but if any licensor of OOXML tries to follow their lead, then Microsoft could sue them for violating the terms of the license. Microsoft looks like they are going ahead regardless of the standardization, but this certainly has a potential to get messy.
Microsoft would get a great deal of negative press for a move to copy its own deviation from the standard and it would jeopardize its use in government, but it is a possible scenario under this flawed standard. More likely they will just extend the format in awkward ways while still technically following the standard, that way they can maintain technical compliance with ECMA OOXML and just jam in incompatibilities under the allowed way of doing extensions.
So you have an email attack based on the idea that people keep the phone number of their bank in their address book? Rather why would I bother if I can always just get it off their website or from my statement? I suppose changing an electronic statement to put the fake number on it is also possible. But how is this really related to VOIP? The problem still remains one of some email attachment taking over your computer and accessing your personal and confidential information that you have stored there. The rest could just as easily be accomplished via the regular phone.
Actually, I am wondering about this so called open standard actually being a way to legally create compatibility problems. I am not sure what the legal framework under which OpenOffice currently opens and writes Word Docs and other Microsoft compatible formats. But it seems that if OOXML becomes the default format, then the only way to use the format would be under a Microsoft license, but if that license requires a full implentation, then Microsoft could probably find something that wasn't implemented the same as MS Office to sue over or else it could break its own compatibility with the format and then sue any company that tried to deviate from the ECMA standard, even though Microsoft can deviate from the standard with impunity and immunity.
Is it so hard to realize that the paper ballots/trails are just as susceptible to election fraud as electronic ballots such that electronic voting is just another unfounded conspiracy theory in your mind?
Yes, it is. Election fraud is much harder to pull off when it involves someone actually putting pen to paper. Logistics are important to election fraud because it has to involve as few people as possible and be very uncomplicated to assure success. Pressing a few buttons on a computer and having a voting history destroyed or writing a program that simulates vote casting is much easier and importantly could involve fewer people than physically creating individual frauds of paper ballots.
Oh well then, let me update my rant:
"This circle is half colored in. Obviously the voter intended to vote for my candidate."
"No, it's not completely filled in. Therefore this ballot is in error and doesn't count."
"This guy voted for Pat Buchanan, obviously his vote is incorrect."
Yes, the form of paper ballots matter. In my town we do well enough with having to connect an arrow with a magic marker. No it is not perfect and mistakes in "interpretation" could be made during a recount even asking people to make a clear mark. But the important thing is that there are clearly defined criteria for counting a vote that the average person can meet within a human margin of error.
My point to all this is that I voted in a county that had mechanical voting machines for nearly 50 years. They didn't have a paper trail. The only thing that was updated was a mechanical counter inside the machine that kept the tallies. These machines were opened during the day to check the counts (at which point they could also be tampered with) and at the end of the day these counts were read off and phoned to the central office then the counts were reset.
That would be just as bad as any other virtual ballot system, but I doubt you are describing the story in full. I too have voted on the machines with the little switches and the big lever, but I recall that there was also a roll of paper where a mark was made for each vote cast, which could be recounted if needed. I have nothing against this method, or for that matter computer ballots, as long as there is a physical record of the actual vote. What was lacking in the machine you describe, was a way for the voter to verify that the vote was recorded the way he or she voted.
What's the difference between the mechanical and the evoting ones? Ultimately nothing. Ultimately you have to trust the people running the system because otherwise Democracy means nothing because you don't trust your fellow man to properly vote or check your vote. I realize that's difficult when Bush is trying to orchestrate a coup to overthrow Democracy, especially after all those Diebold machines gave the vote to Republicans in this last mid-term election. But hey, that's how it goes.
The point is that you have to trust most people in a Democracy to do the right thing, but you can't trust everyone. The system must be designed so that individual corruption does not so easily corrupt the whole system. Computer balloting, especially without a voter verified paper trail, threatens this principal. In the past sure you could have a vast conspiracy involving hundreds of people strategically positioned at polling places to gum up the works in your opponents territory... so that what it took was a fairly elaborate dirty tricks outfit to steal an election. Now you have 5 or 10 people that know a thing or two about computers and find some vulnerability in the system and hack the election in a wholesale way.
Oh and it also becomes much more believable when the election machines stop working in a particularly busy district and the long lines reduce turnout and votes never even get cast. Much harder to justify those long turnout reducing lines when all someone needs is a pen and a surface to write on.
Though e
Actually the US did have a standing army, the Marines
Technically speaking the Marines Corps are part of a standing Navy. The extent to which the Marines are a independent land fighting force was at least partly because of the founders fears of a standing Army which became separate from the citizenry.
I can tell you first hand that there are a lot of military families out there who love America, but despise most civilian Americans as undeserving of their freedom. This is the most dangerous type of factionalism which has played itself out in predictable ways in other countries over and over again throughout history. Thankfully that there is enough turnover in the military to discourage this potential factionalism from becoming dominant. And the doctrine of service is repeated over and over again at every level.
But the founders had it right, as a society in the longer term we are much better off with a smaller standing Army but with a much bigger reservoir of reserves. This promotes defense over offense and prevents an idling Army from getting resentful and ambitious. But most importantly it makes us one people in our nations defense instead of factions looking out for themselves.
"Oh yeah because paper ballots were used so well to confirm the Florida elections in 2000 and sparking a constitutional crisis."
I consider paper ballots as where the person actually makes a mark with ink on a piece of paper, not some weird misconceived contraption where you punch holes in the paper with a poker. By that way of thinking even if the computer makes the actual mark you would still be calling it a paper ballot. Pen and paper, is it that inefficient that we are scrambling to get away from it?
Is it so hard to conceive of an imperfect world where people don't want to play by the rules, that election fraud is relegated to just another unfounded conspiracy theory in you mind?
I do think the motivations of some are very suspicious, but I think the motivations are probably more based on the desire to make money on voting equipment. That voting machines make election fraud easier and nearly undetectable maybe just a side benefit.
Oh and were those hanging chads really worse than a virtual electronic ballot? At least the malfunction in the system was detectable. In a computer, errors in programming or hardware, either intentional or not, would be somewhat abstracted from the final result. Personally, I would prefer that both I and the elected person know that there is some doubt as to the intentions of the electorate versus allowing a elected official to hold office without knowing that his or her election was the result of some funny business.
But yes, some people would rather live in a society without integrity where the conflicts and corruption is ignored for as long as possible. Short term peace at the expense of longer term integrity.
Video podcasts can definitely outperform traditional broadcast media in some ways, but to even imagine that they will supplant/usurp regaulr television is naive.
Ah but you are missing the point. Podcasts are a distribution mechanism for video content, not a separate form of content. Podcasts could indeed supplant regular television as a broadcast medium, just as the Internet has supplanted television and newspapers for a lot of our entertainment already. The big players will just move to the new medium, as they have been doing. So it isn't that the lone podcasters can match the superior technical skills and equipment of the big media companies, it is that they don't need to in order for video podcasts to become more popular. People like to download videos, and bigger players will either move or evolve into this online space, just as they have in other traditional media areas that have moved online. The biggest difference is that now instead of the only 5 content distributors that you had with broadcast licenses and cable monopolies you will have a top 5 out of millions, the only thing to stop this is if the ISP monopolies are allowed to begin to discriminate against Internet traffic that competes with their content.
Threats of bodily harm by the police or government agents are actually illegal as an interrogation method (despite the actual use of threats more recently), but otherwise lying to someone is not. So, you can't legally lie to them, but they can legally lie to you.
But I did excited about the plans to look for other earth like (or at least earth sized) planets in other nearby solar systems. Finding a planet with the potential for complex life, and not just microbes or bacteria should be the goal of exploration. And we are pretty sure at this point that ain't happening in this solar system. So build bigger telescopes or try to figure out a way to get out of our solar system in a human lifetime and I will be excited, but until then I will be more excited about how many pixels are in my next camera or how fuel efficient my next car is or how medicine is improving quality of life.
There are people who are desperate to get as many articles on Blue Ray and HD-DVD written in order to push both the format of the media and HD technology in general. There are 10s, if not 100s, of billions of dollars at stake and plenty of marketing money to grease tech writers and publishers wheels. The government too has a horse in this race as digital television must not only succeed but at least appear to be popular in the market to justify the forced change over to HD that is taking place. Eventually consumers will have better choices. Right now it isn't a question of whether HD is better for viewing video or not, but at this point it seems that the price isn't worth the product. To spend thousands of dollars before you even start talking about the cost of the actual content that will be displayed on the technology, simply isn't a type of math that most people can afford to do. For now you will have a steadily increasing minority switching over to HD TVs, but for most people they are going to be much better off spending their technology dollars on lower priced computer equipment where they can be both entertained and productive, rather than the entertainment dollar black hole which is what HDTV is all about.
It wasn't so much that so many "ideas" failed in the 90s, it was just the one really bad idea that failed: That you can build a profitable company by just getting people to come to your website without any idea of how to get them to come back or how you where going to make money from them while you had their attention.
.com blowouts, it is hard to say which "ideas" were bad ones for profitable websites. Even niche web sites which couldn't be profitable on there own, have sometimes been successfully integrated into some larger network of websites which can make enough money to support a business that can support its employees plus make a profit for its owners.
I think just about every actual content idea has since made money for some company or other, but with many casualties along the way. But given how many businesses fail, let alone new businesses, from sandwich shops to
Often we fixate on the mega successes and failures, but overlook the thousands of small businesses or individuals that have made a decent living off of what others would term "bad ideas" that larger companies couldn't make profitable.
Ah but the legal theory there is based on consent. You can refuse to have your bag searched, but then you don't get to ride the train. Similar to the way government buildings search people, they can search your stuff because you give them permission to do so. At any point you could say no and turn around and leave. Same theory with airports. Not sure, how those signs that say that just being on the train or on public property means that you have already consented to being searched would legally work though. For practical purposes, you could just say you didn't see the signs and/or that you do not agree to be searched and then if they went ahead anyway then I believe the search would have to be considered illegal.
I could see how a judge might be tempted to allow illegal searches to go ahead, but I really don't see how you can claim consent if before the bag is searched the person would explicitly deny their consent. But I could see how once a sign like that was posted giving notification implied consent, then that would certainly apply to active scans of people and things like that.
But then again, good laws are being ignored for the sake of convenience here in the US these days, so pretty much all you need to do is claim some sort of vague legal principal of police necessity and crush whatever civil right you choose.
The problem with many linux users is that they fail to realize that your "normal" computer user is NOTHING like they are. Linux CAN succeed but it really needs a set of standards to follow. People don't like inconsistency. They really don't even like choice. They don't want to have to choose one of the 300 active distros.
I'm sorry, but this "linux users... fail to realize.." stuff is really old. Linux users don't fail to realize, but most can't do anything about it. Saying that people don't want choice is all well and good, but... who gets to decide what choices people don't get to make? I am sure that Fedora people wouldn't care if ubuntu and debian went away and vice versa. And the KDE team would be just fine if Gnome decided to fold up shop, though I think we would all miss the stupid arguments like this thread. And if Windows went away then there would certainly be the less choice that you seem to think people want.
"They want "Linux" and they want it to work as easily as Windows does."
Now you are contradicting yourself. Regular users don't want choice, you say, even if there is equivalent functionality, especially if there is equivalent functionality.
As a Linux user, I want Linux to work more easily than windows does. And I believe most current linux users want linux to work at least as easily as windows does, but would expect more in terms of free software and capability than Windows in order to justify the switching costs. But people should be clear, when by "work as easily" we don't mean anything really to do with the desktop layout or what programs are accessible in the menus or how applications actually start or how do you manage your files. All that basic functionality is there and works as well and is possibly easier to use than windows. What we mean by "works as well" really is that we want plug and play capabilities or at least plug and play with a good sub set of peripheral devices to meet all the every day desktop and laptop computing needs.
With Linux on the desktop and laptop it seems like it is always going to be just that one thing. It is the same problem that Mac OS users had all those years. You walk into a store, you have a wall of peripherals certified to work for Windows. Some for Mac and even fewer more basic things like network cards and the like might come with a penguin on it.
But then, especially if you do your homework you can find some web site somewhere that says they got a particular device that you need to work on the distro that you are using. So you go ahead and buy it because it is the cheapest one that still has a decent brand you recognize. These days it seems to be wireless USB 802.11 devices, and PCMCIA cards or the like, at least have cause me the most problems. So you get your device home, cross your fingers, plug it in and then you find you just wasted $30 on something that some guy on some web site thought he got working, but apparently didn't write down the right steps. Oh and you wasted an hour figuring you must have done something wrong yourself. You probably did, or really I probably did, but the point is that it should have been plug and play.
Sure there are plenty of places to go and get hardware lists, and these days wikis are making it easier to get decent information, but these throw away statements about ease of use aren't very helpful to people working on these problems. Linux is easy, probably easier than Windows. But companies aren't making products to meet the demand because Windows is a higher volume market. I'd be willing to pay $5 more for a USB 802.11 dongle if I knew that it would work with my ubuntu install and I could call support if it didn't, but the market isn't big enough for the manufacturers to bother.
So, the army of volunteers making things work is a double edged sword when it comes to newer devices. The server market has been easier to crack precisely because there is a much more limited set of devices that you would want to attach to a server. Also, embe
Not by the Supreme Court, who ruled that you have NO reasonable expectation of privacy in the public sphere.
Um what? Your possessions are still protected by privacy rights. Possessions such as your bags or your vehicles cannot be searched without a warrant or your permission. But actual possession is the key here as in a bag left in a public place could be searched without a warrant, but a bag that you carry or keep near yourself so as to still be exercising control in a public place cannot.
If it's something that will likely require people to type the domain name (as opposed to just clicking a link) I will usually set up www.home.theirdomain.com as well as home.theirdomain.com
Good practice. And one step further set up the apache redirect to have www.home.theirdomain.com redirect to home.theirdomain.com
This is identical to MS reasoning with regard to file formats; the only difference being that MS has to be very careful about who they sue due to anti-trust issues whereas AutoDesk has no such worries.
Why shouldn't they be worried? What percentage of this market do they control?
That stuff usually scales quadratically or worse with the number of objects, so it is quite some difference between a 64 player BF2 match and a lazy 2000 player day on a WoW server. If a lot of players have the stupid idea of gathering in a small area, things really get fun. Doing this requires some real hardware.
Like what? Even spec'ing out a Dell Poweredge 6800 with Quad 3.4GHz/800Mhz/16mb Cache, Dual-Core Intel® Xeon 7140M Procssors and 32GB or RAM comes to just $22,780. What kind of hardware is WoW running on? Everquest? Everquest has 1500 servers around the world according to this article They don't make their own quantum computers or anything, so they must be using the same hardware as everyone else. I'm guessing that at worst you could invest 100k in hardware and get a decent size virtual world going on 4 or 5 high end machines. Or take that same 100k and plunk it down on say 30 lower end servers and you have yourself some serious hardware capability with today's processors.
Or don't have a single monolithic game space, but rather have individual developers create a unified distributed gaming space. The web of online gaming. That would distribute the costs over multiple small developers and instead of one company needing thousands of computers to rival a big time publisher, they could invest in just a few to create a small part of a larger virtual world. Yes, the economics are still not as appealing as say running a simple web site, but expectations for an interactive online experience are pushing us in this direction. We can either choose to accept fragmentation and proprietization of the web or we can choose to adapt the open source movement to the new technology.
Most websites offer their users rather disjoint snapshots of a current state. A game needs to push a common state with some realtime requirements to all clients in a certain environment. This gets into some problems of computer science that aren't usually encountered by your common blog or webshop.
Like I said the hardware requirements are higher, but one can have about 64 simultaneous users on about $500 worth of hardware at todays prices and much less than a thousand a year in hosting. So, as long as the software allowed clustering it wouldn't take more than a few tens of thousands in hardware and yearly bandwidth costs for running a pretty large multiplayer domain. This is easily in the reach of a small business, which would need to limit its personnel costs as its primary cost consideration. A lot of the so called computer science considerations go away once you start with previously developed software. And once you are talking about creating a user community there are plenty of people that are willing to contribute content in order to make their game playing and those of others more enjoyable. I just don't see the inherent barriers that you seem to see. At least once the software would be made open source and freely available.
It is infinitely easier to create and run a website than to run an MMO.
Why so? Seems the biggest inherent difference is simply processing power needed on the server and client sides and bandwidth... but those are things that are getting cheaper every year.
All the management and sys admin stuff are done in a variety of ways through self management by many different types of open web communities. And who says that it has to be free just because the software and graphics become open source. It just means that small companies could spring up using free software to power their pay for MMOs, but that they could charge some monthly fee. I mean a lot of subscription websites run on apache and other open source free software. Server Software being open source and free makes a lot of sense because it allows greater standardization and efficiency so that a greater variety of content offerings can be made.
Contrary to popular belief, an MMOG requires a lot of logistics, financial backing and personnel to be run.
The same could have been said about websites 10 years ago, but that didn't stop tens of thousands of people from giving it a try. And... some succeeded. Or at least made a living at it, and the number of people just trying made the Internet a better thing to connect to.
They've tried to introduce $1 coins a couple times, but people don't seem to like them.
I think that is an incorrect characterization. It would be more accurate to say that people saw no reason to stop using dollar bills in favor of coins. I think if you introduced a 0.25 paper bill, then you would see a similar lack of acceptance which has little to do with the relative merits of coins versus paper money.